Google My Business, all you need to know for better search engine visibility

Google has been at the heart for many business owners in recent years and it’s even more important than ever to get your business familiar with Google amidst COVID 19 pandemic. For this reason, it’s very crucial for small business owners to know how Google sources and aggregate business information in the Search Engine Result.  

How Google sources business information

Information in local listings is compiled from a variety of sources:

• Publicly-available information, such as crawled web content (e.g., information from your business’ official website)
• Licensed data from third parties
• Users who contribute factual information (such as addresses and phone numbers), and content (such as photos and reviews), including business owners who claim local listings through Google My Business
• Information based on Google’s interactions with a local place or business

What is Google My Business?
Google My Business is a free tool that allows you to promote your Business Profile and business website on Google Search and Maps. It’s a tool from Google that helps you to list your business on Google’s business directory for better local visibility and score. With your Google My Business account, you can see and connect with your customers, post updates to your Business Profile, and see how customers are interacting with your business on Google.

GMB can be considered as a first must-use tool if you are just getting started with your online marketing campaign.  Any information you fill while creating your business profile helps you to shout-out on search results to a great extent as stuff you publish appears on search as soon as you post it. 

What can you do with GMB?
Improve local SEO and prepare your official website to rank better.
Create, Publish and Manage Your business  Information and Services you offer.
Share Latest News and Updates of company
Get review for your business and respond to your customers in an effective manner.

How to sign up for Google My Business?
Google has provided an easy to use mechanism to create your business profile whether or not you have a physical contact office. To start your business profile, you can simply go to google and search for “Google My Business” and start the process by using “Manage Now” buttons which require you to have a gmail account under which you shall list the business you own. This will then take you through the business listing process.

Among all other search engines like Baidu, BIng, Yahoo, ask.com, AOL.com, WolframAlpha, DuckDuckGo, Internet Archive, and Yandex.ru etc. Google is the number one search engine and majority of web search are Google driven. 

If you’re a local business owner and have a website to publish your content, your contents are supposed to be crawled by Google which takes a considerable amount of time. But waiting may not be a best fit for your ongoing digital marketing effort. So here comes GMB, using which you shall post articles and contents directly to Google’s business directory.

STEPS TO CREATE YOUR CONTENTS ON GMB:

• Open your browser, and goto https://www.google.com/business. Register your business there and follow necessary steps to provide enough information.
• After business listing, Click on the “Posts” tab. You can select post types such as article, story, video, poll, COVID19 UPdates and event etc.
• Follow the on-screen prompts
• Click on the “Preview” button to take a glance at how your article or post will appear on Google search. If everything is okay, you can click the “Create” button followed by “Publish”.
• YAY! You’re all set now.

By publishing contents this way, it will appear on searches and Google map immediately. You won’t have to go through the time consuming process of crawlers from Google to reach your web page and index it to appear on the Search Engine Result Page(SERP). If you’ve any issue or problem regarding “Google My Business” page setup, just reach out to us for assistance, which is free of cost. All the very best for your marketing effort. Cheers!